Two years ago, Brandy Fay was sleeping on a bunk bed in Kuwait. Two years ago, she was transporting a myriad of large weapons to different Army bases. Two years ago, she feared that a roadside bomb might find her while she was driving.

But on Thursday afternoon, Fay was in the Veteran’s Center, showing off her five-day-old son Brycen to her veteran family. Friends of the 25-year-old passed around the sleeping boy as onlookers did their best to suppress comments about his chubby cheeks and tiny orange T-shirt.

On a regular weekday afternoon, the Veteran’s Center is not particularly exciting, filled with a few employees and maybe a couple of students. On Thursday, it was standing room only.

Fay said these are the people she fought for when she was in Iraq.

“I didn’t support exactly what we were fighting for and it didn’t matter,” Fay said. “What I was fighting for was my goddaughter, now obviously my son — I fight for all my friends and family. That’s why I do what I do.”

Fay is living in Columbia and taking classes at MU, although she’s still enlisted in the Army Reserves. She recently switched her emphasis in the military from transportation to patient administration.

Fay joined the military when she was 17. She said she had to beg her mother to sign a form of consent since she wasn’t legally an adult. After Fay’s mother gave in to her persistent pleading, Fay went to boot camp the summer after her junior year of high school.

“That was my senior trip kind of,” Fay said. “All my other friends were doing trips and everything and I was like ‘I want to go to boot camp!’”

Fay said she has wanted to be in the military for as long as she can remember. Her mother still says it was all she talked about when she was a kid.

Fay’s grandfathers were veterans and they were a big influence on her. She always saw them as her heroes, and they always treated her like their little girl. Fay said the best advice came from her Grandpa Pflum and Grandpa Reeves.

“My Grandpa Reeves, he would always say ‘I think anyone, doesn’t matter if they’re a boy or a girl — if they want all their freedoms and everything, they should serve,’” Fay said. “That was his big thing that he always pushed.”

Grandpa Reeves died when she was around 5. She remembers sitting on her father’s shoulders and looking into the open casket, not sure what was going on.

“It was really rough,” Fay said. “I can still remember it even though I was so little.”

Fay said she learned a lot from her grandfathers. She learned to never ask a veteran if they have killed anybody — not a wise choice, she said — as well as the importance of patriotism.

Fay is quick to tell people that she is patriotic. She said it is “almost gross” how much she loves her country.

“It’s just something that comes from the inside,” Fay said. “I’ve always had it.”

Fay said she always kind of knew she would fight for her country one day.

“There was never a doubt,” Fay said. “And now, I don’t regret anything.

Fay got the call that she was going to be deployed to Iraq in April 2008. She got the same call in 2010 when the Army told her she was needed again. Both deployments, Fay’s job was to transport tanks and other large weaponry, driving a truck from base to base.

She said she got nervous every night when they rolled out on their missions, and she’ll never forget the few times she heard gunfire on the outside of her vehicle. She liked to remind herself that many people in the military were in worse situations.

“We definitely saw combat, but that wasn’t anything terrible,” Fay said. “I just saw these things that other people went through, and honestly our occasional (improvised explosive device) was (no big deal).”

Fay got back from her second deployment in the spring of 2011. She enrolled in courses at MU and decided to pursue a health sciences major. She also took a server job at Hooters to make some money while she was attending college.

She still laughs about the job and is not quick to bring it up with her friends. Hooters, however, was where she met her boyfriend of 11 months, Steven McCool.

He came in to the restaurant on Super Bowl Sunday. It was not too busy and she ended up talking to him during the game, discovering he was a veteran like her. She said she asked him out on that Sunday night.

“He was just funny and really laid back, which I really enjoyed,” Fay said.

Just a few weeks into their relationship, McCool discovered he had testicular cancer. He had dealt with the disease before, successfully beating it in August of 2012, but his doctor told him it had spread to his abdominal lymph nodes. McCool was told he would have to do chemotherapy.

But Fay stuck with him through the sickness.

McCool said he was surprised Fay stood by his side, given that most people would be frightened by the situation.

“It just showed the kind of person she was during that time,” McCool said.

When McCool learned Fay was pregnant, it was his turn to stick by her side. Fay said they have both been supportive of each other through thick and thin.

“He’s like my perfect other half,” Fay said. “He counterbalances me.”

Fay still has a lot going on in her life, but she said she is happy with where she is right now. She has a healthy baby boy who is a little more than a week old. She is in a happy relationship McCool, who is doing much better with his illness. She has a support system at the MU Veteran’s Center.

Still, Fay knows another deployment may be in her future. She said there may be a day when she has to go to back overseas, leaving her loved ones behind in Missouri.

Fay said she hopes that day doesn’t come for a while, but she knows she would serve in a heartbeat if she got another call from the Army. After all, Fay has a lot of people to fight for.

“I need to do my part,” Fay said. “It’s not like I’m out there on the front lines or anything like that, but I need to do the support of our mission to be able to protect what I have…now more than ever.”